It’s side control month again, where this week we’re looking at maintaining side control. Last night focused on ‘hip to hip’ side control (class write-up on slideyfoot.com as always), with lots of drills intended to help students get used to mobility from side control.

In the ‘no hands’ drill, you have to try and either maintain or escape side control, but with a twist: your hands are either behind your back or tucked into your belt. The idea is to help students really focus on where they are putting their weight and staying mobile. You can check out some brief Instagram video here, on our @artemisbjj account. The longer YouTube version is embedded below: be sure to follow our YouTube channel if you haven’t already! 🙂

On Wednesday we’ll be covering some transitional movements, before progressing to a sequence of related attacks on Friday with the breadcutter choke. Open mat is on as normal on Sunday, although Can and several of the team will be at the Hereford Open. Best of luck to everybody competing.

Artemis BJJ is a year old! We’ve come a long way since January 2014 and our classes are expanding. As a result, from this Monday onwards, there will be an additional 30 minutes of open mat time after the Monday class. In a few months’ time, we’ll also hopefully be able to move to the bigger mats on the Wednesday: watch this space for updates.

Having gone through the other two main varieties of guard (closed and open), it’s time to move on to half guard. This is a versatile position with plenty of variations, the common thread being that you have one of their legs under control. Our focus will be the ‘orthodox’ half guard, moving into some other useful versions like the knee shield towards the end of the month.

Closed guard is a solid defensive position with multiple high percentage attacks, but eventually somebody will break your closed guard open. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to stop them before they fully pass, trapping them in half guard. If you’re not careful about your transition from side control to mount, you may also find they snatch your leg and put you in half guard.

Basic half guard involves trapping one of their legs, blocking the cross-face and looking for the underhook, propping yourself up on your side. To pass, the person on top will look to flatten their opponent onto their back, applying the cross-face and avoiding the underhook.

Half guard is perhaps the only truly neutral position in jiu jitsu. There are reliable submissions from both the top and the bottom, with many of the attacks from side control remaining viable (although the trapped leg cuts out any submission requiring a transition to north-south, which includes several powerful chokes).

Join us in February to learn more about this essential guard subcategory!

Open guard has many applications: here it is being used to send Can flying through the air

In closed guard, your legs are around the waist of your opponent, while in half you’ve captured one of their legs. Eventually, you will find that your opponent has been able to disengage your legs: that’s where open guard comes in.

With open guard, you do not necessarily start out attached to your opponent: your legs and arms can be in a vast number of different configurations, which results in countless open guard sub-types. Some of them involve grips on the legs, others manipulate the gi, some rely on hooking with the feet.

This month, we will be focusing on the basics of open guard, then moving on to some butterfly guard towards the end of January. We look forward to helping you navigate the complex terrain of open guard!

Brazilian jiu jitsu is probably most famous – and indeed most innovative – in its use of the guard position. Although this was certainly a part of BJJ’s parent art, judo, it is in BJJ that the guard has arguably reached its highest level of sophistication.

Closed guard is where it all begins. From the perspective of the person on the bottom, you need to control your partner’s posture, breaking them down so that they can neither sit up nor stand up. When you’ve broken their posture (we covered the basics of that on Monday), they will also find it harder to avoid your submission attempts.

The closed guard has numerous submission opportunities, such as chokes, armbars and omoplatas. The transition between the triangle, armbar and omoplata is particularly effective. However, If they manage to stand up, it becomes quite difficult to submit them, as they now have gravity on their side.

On the other hand, a standing opponent is still vulnerable to sweeps. We will be covering various sweeps this month, enabling you to move from the guard (essentially a neutral position) into mount, side control and the back (all dominant positions).

For the person on top, we will examine various methods for passing the closed guard, as well as basics like posture and grip breaking. Unlike open guard, you first need to break the closed guard, a topic in itself (here’s one method). Once that is accomplished, there are many methods for moving around their legs, most of which also have applicability in other types of guard.

Mount is the classic starting point for your BJJ journey. Rorion Gracie used to teach the upa and controlling the mount in his famous intro lesson. It’s a great way of showing just how potent a force leverage can be, even if you’re much smaller than the person sat in mount. For that reason among others, the upa was also the first lesson I taught at the Artemis BJJ women’s class.

We are nearing the end of my planned lesson cycle for the women’s class (which will then restart). This month, the techniques in the mixed class should feel very familiar to students from the women’s class, as you’ve spent a lot of time on mount. That means that along with being a great point for any beginner to start up at Artemis BJJ, November is also a particularly good time for women’s class regulars to dip your toes into the mixed class waters.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be going through the upa and the elbow escape, along with a couple of other mount escape options. We’ll then examine how to hold the mount, as well as some of the powerful submissions from there.

I started my own BJJ journey with multiple world champion Roger Gracie in 2006 (and I’ve never left his lineage): he is very well known for his cross choke from mount. Join us at Artemis BJJ in November to learn what Roger taught me about his iconic choke!

Returning to our first ever position of the month, Artemis BJJ will be exploring side control over October. BJJ terminology is not standardised, so this position has a few other names. The most common alternatives are ‘side mount’ and ‘cross side’: for a listing of some others, take a look at Can’s BJJ glossary.

In jiu jitsu, you will find that – especially early on – you will spend a lot of time trying to escape from under side control, so it’s an essential skill to develop. We’ll be looking at some key escapes for the next fortnight.

Maintaining the position is also important. Side control tends to be the preferred top position for beginners, as it is initially easier to hold than mount (though as you’ll discover in the coming months, mount is just as powerful, if not more so. However, the nuances of holding mount can be a bit tricky when you’re starting out).

We will of course also be investigating a few attacks from side control as well. Once you can maintain side control, it becomes a great platform from which to launch your offence.

We’ve now done a full circuit of the six major positions in BJJ, so in September it’s time to return to the back. More specifically, we’re going to focus on a variation called the ‘turtle’, where you are on your elbows and knees. This position is common when you’re trying to pass the guard and your partner turns to stop you securing side control

If you can reach the back, you can attack your opponent with relative impunity, whereas there is almost nothing they can attack in return. There are many submissions available to you here, especially chokes, both with and without the gi. This is true both for the orthodox back control in the picture above, as well as the turtle.

However, while a number of the same submissions can be attempted from the turtle, it can be difficult to break the turtle open. To really attack, you ideally want to get your hooks in place, after which you can transition to a more standard back control.

There are also offensive options directly from the turtle, such as the iconic clock choke. We’ll also be considering some more advanced options like the crucifix, a very powerful position if you’re able to secure it.

Open guard has many applications: this month we’ll be looking at a few more

Having done focused on open guard during July, we decided that there is so much to the position that it warranted another month (keep in mind that the new free women’s class will not stick to open guard in August, following a condensed positional overview instead). That means we will continue to explore some of the numerous variations in the guard when your legs are open. Spider guard and butterfly are two of the most popular options, which Can will be exploring at Bristol Sports Centre.

Spider guard provides excellent control, as you use your opponent’s gi against them. The simplest version involves grabbing their sleeves and curling your feet around their biceps, pushing firmly into one arm with your leg while pulling on the other with your sleeve grip. You can achieve even better control by using a ‘lasso’, where you wrap one of your legs around an arm. We’ll be looking at how to get into that position and some options from there.

Butterfly guard is in some respects simpler, but it requires a greater sensitivity to your training partner’s movements, as your grips are more fluid. The dynamism of this position means that it can take some getting using to, but once you’re comfortable in butterfly, it becomes a powerful platform for submissions and sweeps.

Dónal is away for the first two weeks of August, but classes at Impact will be running as normal, covered by Can. He will be sharing some of his basic open guard classes from July with the students at Impact Gym: if you want to know what to expect, have a look at his open guard lesson plans over the last month, here.

Dónal will be back on the 19th August to guide you through his take on open guard, building on what we learned last month.

Open guard has many applications: here it is being used to send Can flying through the air

Having covered closed and half guard, we are now moving on to what is the third and most varied type, open guard. In closed guard, your legs are around the waist of your opponent, while in half you’ve captured one of their legs. Eventually, you will find that your opponent has been able to disengage your legs: that’s where open guard comes in.

With open guard, you do not necessarily start out attached to your opponent: your legs and arms can be in a vast number of different configurations, which results in countless open guard sub-types. Some of them involve grips on the legs, others manipulate the gi, some rely on hooking with the feet.

This month, we will be focusing on some of the more common sub-types of open guard. Can will be starting off with some basic advice on approaching open guard, while Dónal kicked things off at Impact Gym yesterday with de la Riva guard. That’s one of the most popular open guard positions, where one leg is wrapped around the outside of your partner’s leg, hooking the inside with your foot.

We look forward to helping you navigate the complex terrain of open guard!

Closed guard is a solid defensive position with multiple high percentage attacks, but eventually somebody will break your closed guard open. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to stop them before they fully pass, trapping them in half guard.

Unlike closed guard, in this position you only have one of their legs under control, rather than a grasp around their hips. However, that’s still sufficiently strong to launch a variety of attacks: the half guard has a diversity of variations. Knee shield, lockdown and deep half are some of the most common.

The basic half guard involves trapping one of their legs, blocking the cross-face and looking for the underhook, propping yourself up on your side. To pass, the person on top will look to flatten their opponent onto their back, applying the cross-face and avoiding the underhook.

Half guard is perhaps the only truly neutral position in jiu jitsu. There are reliable submissions from both the top and the bottom, with many of the attacks from side control remaining viable (although the trapped leg cuts out any submission requiring a transition to north-south, which includes several powerful chokes).